Intelligibility and Phonological Processes
You Can Understand Me!
Your heart wants to burst with joy every time you hear him talk. You never thought he’d be verbal at such a young age! He went from making cute sounds to speaking a mile a minute in what seemed like days.
Can You Understand Me?
But then you start to notice things. People smile and talk to him-that’s nothing new. They ask what his name or age is . But when he responds they just smile blankly, but you can tell they didn’t understand him. You realize that you often translate for him, not just to strangers but even family members.
You Don’t Get Me
Then there’s the final shot to your heart. ❤ You drop him off at daycare or preschool, and you hear some bad news. His caretakers and teachers can only understand a word or two. Some can’t understand him AT ALL.🤷🤷
What’s Intelligibility?
Let’s change direction for a minute. First we need some information for all of this to make sense. Being able to understand a person’s speech is called intelligibility. It’s also simplified as “speech clarity.” It’s the proportion of a speaker’s output that a listener can actually understand. A formula suggested by Dr. Peter Flipsen Jr. for intelligibility is a good rule of thumb.
Handy Rule Of Thumb
Divide the age of a child by four and multiply that by a hundred. This means a child of one should be understood 25% of the time. A child of two should be understood 50% of the time. You get the picture. If this held true, then a child of four should be understood 100% of the time. But at the age of four many kids are still working on speech issues. Two of these issues are articulation and phonological processes, which can stick around awhile. Also bear in mind that this rule of thumb applies to children maturing in speech development at a TYPICAL level.
Problems
But if your child is one and he’s not even close to being understood 25% of the time or 50% of the time at age two (and so on and so forth), then most likely there are speech difficulties involved, and intelligibility is compromised.😡
Phono-WHAAAAAT?
Perhaps you’re wondering: what are phonological processes? Is that a phrase you just made up? No, I didn’t just make that up.
The Phonological Process
To clarify, phonological processes are patterns of sound errors that typically developing kids use to simplify speech as they are learning to talk. For example there is “gliding,” when an /r/ becomes a /w/ sound or an /l/ becomes a /w/ or y sound (i.e. wabbit for rabbit). 🐇 “Cluster reduction” is when a consonant cluster is reduced to a single consonant (i.e. pane instead of plane).✈
Why Phonological, Why?
Phonological processes are used by all kids as they are learning to talk because they don’t yet have the ability to coordinate the lips, tongue, teeth, palate and jaw for clear speech.🙊
Phonological Disorders
Just as there are phonological processes which help children simplify adult speech, there are phonological disorders which are a misuse of phonological processes. One type of phonological disorder is when a child is still using phonological processes long after his peer group has given them up. 😢Another example of a phonological disorder is when a child has a different variation of a phonological process than what is expected. And the last type of a phonological disorder is when a child uses too many phonological processes, making him even more difficult to understand.
Parental Help
There are a few things you can do with your kiddo to improve his intelligibility and hopefully reduce phonological processes.
Slow Talker
Talk slower so that your child can copy you. He will spend more time thinking before he talks, which could make him calmer. This could lead to speaking more clearly, increasing his overall intelligibility.
Chunk It Up!
Another method that can help is chunking, which simply means to take big or long pieces of words or sentences and break them up. In speech development it would take long-winded, excited, run-on sentences and exchange them for small bits of clear, intelligible information.
I’m Off To See The SLP
If these methods don’t help or you strongly suspect that your child is intelligible the next step is to contact an SLP. SLP (or SLT), stands for speech and language pathologist (or speech and language therapist).👩💼
Won’t You Please Help Me…And My Son
Don’t be alarmed if your SLP gives your child an evaluation that indicates speech difficulties. That only means that your child can finally get the help he’s probably needed for quite a while now.👦And he’ll be so much more confident when he talks and others can actually understand him!
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